


A very special subject

by 3th4n0l



Category: Original Work
Genre: Abuse, Angst, Cold War, M/M, Most likely historically inaccurate at some points, Original Character(s), Original Slash, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-25
Updated: 2016-05-25
Packaged: 2018-06-10 17:56:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6967246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/3th4n0l/pseuds/3th4n0l
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Original slash in the Cold war period. Soft interrogations, manipulation and eventually madness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A very special subject

**Author's Note:**

> The world need more original and historical slash, so I've spent some time working on this short story. I've just finished it and will most likely subject it to a re-read at some point. I apologize for the eventual word repeats and/or typos, they'll be fixed. Also, I'm well aware that probably not everything will be realistic (I haven't specified which smaller conflict Yuri fought in or whether there was one at all during that period, nor do I know if random soldiers actually deliver intel sometimes). I hope you'll all like it. 
> 
> ps: I've started writing this while reading KUBARK, something I recommend you do too, as it is very interesting.

Yuri had been sitting in a cell for days. Or, what he presumed to be days. When he first got in, he hadn’t received food for roughly ten hours, at least that’s how long it seemed to him. Then, in an unexpected moment, the heavy steel door opened with a clunk and a man dressed in white lab coat positioned a tray on the table. A few moments, and Yuri found himself alone again. It was him, the chair he was sitting on, and the other piece of furniture, with now his food on it. The ‘cell’ wasn’t really a cell either; just an almost empty room with a carefully secured door. Despite the poorness of the décor, Yuri appreciated the window. Surely, it was small and didn’t let a great deal of light in, but seeing the sun produced some kind of hope in him. Hope that he will - by some magical coincidence - escape and go back to his homeland in the steppes. Perhaps see his grandmother, the deep wrinkles of her now brown skin which reminded him of cardboard, her small house, her cows and the two, spotted horses. He ate the condimentless, sticky pasta with delight, thinking of tall trees and homemade vodka. 

Then, they closed the window. A metallic lid on the outside now blocked the sun’s rays, and the man started to sink in depression. They kept feeding him, but the time passing between two meals seemed to vary now. Sometimes a dull plate of vegetables was followed by a few pieces of bread in less than an hour, other times he felt like he hadn’t eaten for eight. He couldn’t tell apart day and night, he started losing weight and then muscle. Yuri, in terror, became aware that his brain was ceasing to function properly. Sometimes, he even lacked the energy to think. His mission ending in failure didn’t interest him a whole lot anymore, and neither did the name list of the ten Soviet agents currently in the US, the godforsaken piece of intel he was supposed to provide to an officer at another base when he got captured. The next time someone brought him food, he couldn’t help but shout something along the lines of ‘WHEN WILL YOU LET ME OUT?’. He got accustomed to the habit of lying on the floor and rolling around, so now he couldn’t see the face of the person who answered him ‘Soon enough, soon enough’ from above. 

Being too tired and stressed to come to the logical conclusion that he had been locked up for a reason, Yuri slowly adopted the belief that they just wanted to let him die there. Someone once told him Americans were cruel, but then again, that someone also said they implemented cruelty usually for a purpose. They are very goal-oriented, said the face of the Commander which suddenly flashed into his mind, but their brutality is not meaningless. Yuri was now convinced that they’d been lying to him, the Commander, the others, his family, comrade Khrushchev - everyone. Americans were animals. They were lower than cows, chicken and pigs. 

His confinement ended, eventually, demonstrating that Yuri did have some importance for said animals, but it was too late to change his mind about them now. First, it was two security guards coming in and handcuffing him. Hell, one would’ve been enough. The prisoner was now reduced to a fraction of his original body mass and strenght. Then Yuri was dragged along the corridor and into something which looked like a laboratory. A few workers in hygene masks fumbled around on their working tables, examining samples with microscopes or combining and heating fluids in flasks. Another one of them entered from the door on the other side of the room, directly in front of Yuri and the guards at his sides. He seemed to be in hurry, as it could be inferred from his tone and movements.

“You will now receive a drug to calm you down. Don’t panic, the officers are definitely leaning towards letting you go free after you talk to them.”

Yuri didn’t quite understand, but went along and drank the salty-sour fluid in the glass the individual had given him. He awaited the psychological effects patiently as they led him along to another room, where the man from before followed them, instructing the guards where to go. They took Yuri’s handcuffs off when they stopped in front of the door. He almost fell to the ground in exhaustion. 

“There is a shower with soap, towels, clean clothes and a sandwhich. Please replenish your forces before you negotiate with the Director. Take your time, I will be waiting for you here, outside” the one in the lab coat said, dismissing the guards. 

He hadn’t been lying. Yuri washed himself, trying to scrub the several layers of dirt off. He had noticed that the small changing room not only contained the objects mentioned by the American from before, but also a hairdrier and two pills with the word Sedative on a sticky note beside them. He cleaned his hair, too, before starting to get dressed. They probably matched the clothes to his measures before confining him, because they all fit him very loosely. He ate the sandwhich, the energy rush starting up his thinking again and telling him to escape at the first opportunity. There was no way to leave the changing room, however, without passing by the man outside. He decided to comply for now. 

He was eventually lead to another door on the corridor, and wished good luck. The man in the lab coat left. Yuri looked at the sign: Director’s office. Were they really going to let him go? He could only find out by entering. There was a chance to not put up a fight or try to escape, and he was so, so tired of doing those things. 

A plain, simple room greeted him. It didn’t look like an office, but rather like a recreational space to get coffee. Two armchairs in front of each other and a small table between them. Lilac walls with abstract paintings. A man sitting in one of the furniture pieces, his face covered by the back of the other chair, on which Yuri sat down with a little more confidence. 

Only then could he take a look at the Director’s features. He appeared a little older than Yuri, his chin resting on top of his palm. Charisma seemed to radiate from him from the very moment the prisoner had seen him, especially since a warm smile was plastered on his face. Sympathetic, almost compassionate, dark eyes, and thick, black hair with streaks of white in it. For a few moments, he only looked at Yuri, slowly shaking his head in a manner a parent would towards their kid. As if he were saying ‘Oh, you did it again, you troublemaker. If only I could get angry at you’. 

Yuri stiffened. The last one or two hours had been a very strange shift and he was still baffled. Nothing around him made sense, as he couldn’t possibly find an explanation as to why everyone’s attitude towards him had suddenly changed. He was now being treated as a guest. Was it a message from central authorities? Was the Cold War over? 

“There’s no need to be tense” a pleasant voice brought him back from his thoughts “Care for some coffee or tea?”

The younger man remained immobile.  
“The coffee is not very good” the Director said, hopping up and walking towards a table with two jugs on it. Only then had the other noticed the two cups on the table with a few sugar cubes, half a lemon, a small glass of water and one of milk for each, positioned around them. 

“Caffeine would only make you even more excited, plus, if you’ve taken a drug, interact with it. Tea would be better. It is your choice, however. If you can resist the effects of coffee, you can have that, too. Pick one. Or none. Both, I wouldn’t suggest.”

After a few moments of hesitation, Yuri answered. His voice came out cracked.

“Tea.”

“Very good!” The Director smiled, bringing along one of the containers and pouring some steaming tea in his guest’s cup. The other man took a slow sip, even frogetting that he liked lemon in it. 

“So, Yuri Mazerov? Is that how you pronounce it?” 

“Mazerov” he said as he put the cup back onto the table, correcting the unnecessary, americanized wovel-stretches. The man was looking through what Yuri presumed to be his own personal dossier. It quickly reminded him that he was still being held captive.

“Mazerov.” The Director corrected himself. He smiled again, showing off his perfect, white teeth. “May I call you Yuri? Or Mr. Mazerov? Which one do you prefer?”

“Yuri is fine.”

The man gave another one of those obnoxious exclamations so common in western culture, something like ‘Perfect!’ or ‘Good!’ before continuing.

“So, Yuri! I’ve met a lot of Russians during work, so I know you guys don’t like blabbering meaninglessly. You strike me as the quiet type too…” he looked at his ‘subject’ for a couple of seconds, nodding a few times as if intensively thinking of something.

“Or am I mistaken?” He continued, looking up.

“I like silence, sir. I am mostly silently” a bit of embarrassment rushed through Yuri when he realized, a second later, his mistake. Despite being a soldier who was supposed to fight against Americans, he still hadn’t perfected his english skills. The Director, however, seemed to have looked past the tongue-tie.

“Oh my god, I’m so sorry!” The other man said with a gesture of panic, which didn’t seem a hundred percent sincere. He stretched out a hand towards Yuri. 

“I completely forgot to introduce myself. I’m David Mabury, but you can call me David.” 

The younger man shook his hand hesitantly. A sip of tea for one and a sip of coffee for the other, and they went back to their earlier positions on the armchairs. 

“So, where were we?” Mabury paused “Oh, right. I was going to ask you a few things. The only thing we need to do is get to know each other, Yuri. It’s not a big deal, so easen up.”

Yuri nodded slowly, eventually relaxing between the plush pillows. He remembered to put lemon in his tea, too. 

“First of all: just tell me about where you come from, why you’re here with me now, and the possible connection between the two.”

Seeing how the other gulped nervously, he continued in an even friendlier tone.

“You shouldn’t worry, y’know. Just speak of your impressions, I assure you that whatever you say won’t have negative consequences. Most fellows get this one wrong; I’ll be surprised if you can guess correctly, in fact.”

“I…” Yuri started, not being completely sure as to what he was beginning to say.

“I come from Russia. I am a soldier of the Great Red Army. I was captured in an expedition. I… I wouldn’t know why I’m here. Am…” he cut himself off before the last question. David, however stared at him demandingly, obviously wanting to hear the omitted part. Yuri then looked him directly in the eye, his train of thought finally arriving to a conclusion.

“Am I being interrogated?”

A few seconds of silence. Mabury sighed a little. 

“You see, I wouldn’t call it an ‘interrogation’” he drank from his coffee. “There are a lot of nasty rumours going around about what we do here. You gotta understand, though, what they do in the military. In not just Russia, but any country, really. Negative impressions about the enemy to make you hostile. It’s a tactic of manipulation. And this is information I’m not authorized to give you, by the way.” David winked. Yuri nodded, a little skeptical, but still more or less persuaded by the explanation.

“Tell me about your life in the military. Was it a shock to become a soldier?” The Russian felt more and more like an interview was being made with him.

“A… little.”

“Did you enjoy childhood more?”

“I enjoyed childhood” Yuri nodded, and then, words kept spilling from him. He didn’t really know why; probably, after being confined in such brutal circumstances, he enjoyed actually talking to someone who listened. Or, just talking at all. He went on a long ramble about the farm he grew up in and how he spent most of his time with his grandma. Anecdotes came out, about him not handling alcohol well due to his relatively weak constitution and getting completely drunk from half a glass of vodka, or about riding horses, how much family meant to him and how devastated he was when his parents both died from minor illnesses because the famine had weakened their immune systems. Yuri didn’t know what the other man was interested in, so he gave him random bits of information about the things he personally deemed important. 

David kept nodding throughout with an understanding look in his eyes, adding phrases like ‘That must’ve been awful’ or ‘If we knew of your background, we wouldn’t have treated you like that’. When the rant ended, he walked up to the table again, as the younger man had drank the remaining tea in his cup.

“I am absolutely ashamed of what we made you go through. The officers responsible for your confinement will be held accountable.” He sat back.

“You know, when one thinks of soldiers, it’s usually an image of a physically strong and aggressive brute. That’s what this system is designed for, and it’s a horrible mistake, frankly.”

Yuri watched curiously and bewilderedly as David stood up, only to stop next to his chair and place a firm hand on his shoulder. 

“You are a very special subject, Yuri. I peg you as intelligent and sensible… Albeit much more vulnerable than the mindless monkeys who usually have success as soldiers.”

“I don’t understand” the ‘special subject’ responded with the only English sentence he had memorized perfectly.

“We’ll talk more.”

And with that pharse David gave him one of his smiles and Yuri could almost feel the warmth tingling through his body as his self-worth grew back slowly. He ignored the rational part of his brain; the only thing he saw was this man, this only, shining beacon of light who was going to save him. 

Yuri was dismissed and closed the office door behind himself. He felt incredibly lightheaded as two guards led him on the way to wherever they were taking him. He was put in a room equipped with some basic furniture and a bathroom. The bed had simple, white sheets on it, with a pile of folded clothes on top; probably his impromptu wardrobe for the time being. There was a table, too, with pen and paper. The orange-ish sunlight filtered through the lace curtains made him deduce that it was either dawn or sunset. 

The man used to have a hobby - drawing, namely. He wasn’t particularly talented; the ‘masterpieces’ often lacked a basic knowledge of anatomy and lighting physics. More than anything, Yuri liked details. He found delight in carefully marking every square-millimeter of the paper with his pencil, tracing every line with the accuracy of a compass. Pens made it a little harder, because he couldn’t erase his mistakes, meaning he had to pay extra attention. He could manage, nonetheless. And there he sat, trying to immortalize the few memories he had of David Mabury’s face. Americans had something particular about them, he’d taken note. Maybe he was too used to Russians’ coldness, but the few captured spies, war prisoners or double agents he’d seen so far seemed to have a commonality. They all had this obnoxiously open and friendly air to them, unsettlingly big smiles and loud tones. Yuri had to narrow down his stereotype to ‘friendly’, as the man he was making a portrait of had absolutely nothing irritating about him. Rather, he was like a soothing blanket, something to cling to in this current state of desperation.

He had long given up thinking about said current state. The young Russian could’ve gotten killed. From that point onwards, he didn’t have any demands from life. He felt somewhat relieved by the mere fact that he could be sitting there, well-nurtured and clean, doing something he enjoyed doing. In the meanwhile, David’s face was starting to come together from all the little pen strokes. Yuri often mimicked the expressions of the people he was drawing, as if that could help him capture it more. It must’ve looked ridiculous from the outside, but he was usually too fixated to care. Quite conveniently, there was a mirror hanging from the wall right above his table. One glance upwards was enough to distract him from drawing.

He’d gotten incredibly pale and thin, but that didn’t matter. What bothered him was that his now gaunt cheeks were unable to reproduce that reassuring smile. It looked bad on Yuri, horribly, pathetically bad. He almost seemed sadder comparing to him not making an expression at all. But, he told himself, it’ll get better. They’ll feed him and he’ll look human again.

Yuri managed to sleep surprisingly well. He saw the morning light when he woke up, which was a good hint at the fact that his daily routine had gotten back on track. A few minutes later the door (which had been locked from the outside up to then) opened. A women - presumably a janitor - deposited a tray on the table. Two fried eggs, asparagus, toast and coffee. 

After he’d finished eating, he resumed his drawing. Suddenly, there was click again, and one guard outside called him by name. He already knew where he was going as they strode down the narrow corridors, and he felt the signs of nervousness on himself, though he wasn’t quite sure what exactly caused it. He still didn’t know where they were going with his ‘treatment’, but one thing was sure: if he met David, something was going to happen, and that was enough for him to feel excited.

“Well, good morning, Yuri!” the director turned around, interrupting his reading of something deposited on the office table. He walked up to the other man as the door closed. 

“Good morning, sir” he responded, trying to make his voice the less faint possible. Yuri had taken a mental note not to smile too much.

“I told you to call me David, didn’t I?” he shook his head, playfully feigning disappointment “Please, take a seat!”

The other did as he was told, leaning back into the soft armchair he was getting accustomed to. There was a plate full of biscuits on the coffee table, as well as a cup of freshly poured tea. Yuri considered telling the older man that he’d had breakfast already, then he ditched the idea, given that David probably already knew. And, as though he was a mind reader, he asked:

“How do you feel? How was breakfast?”

“Very good!” Yuri blurted out enthusiastically.

“Is it something you would’ve had in Russia?”

“Not really. We ate bread and butter… with little vodka too.”

David let out a laughter which had nothing malicious or mocking in it. 

“That’s understandable, you have quite a horrible weather, after all.” He continued “Would you tell me something about your acquintances? Your friends? The people you like having around?”

“I didn’t have many” Yuri said with a little embarrassment “I had my family and this one friend. That all.”

“May I ask you about your ‘one friend’?” David inspected him as he adopted a relaxed, left-ankle-on-right-knee pose. 

“Sure. His name was Dima, Dmitri. We were in the army together. He saw no one was talking to me so he came up and said ‘Hey, I don’t like the other folks. We should stick together’. And we went together everywhere from then. Nobody started trouble with us.”

“What was Dima like?”

“Big man, tall and bulky. But he was peaceful.”

“Did you keep in touch with him after the war?”

“Died on the battlefield. They got him in the head with a gun.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.” David reached out with one hand to stroke Yuri’s shoulder with a look of genuine conern on his face. 

The conversation went on and Yuri told anecdotes about Dima. It’s strange how he hadn’t thought of his friend in a while now and he was a little ashamed that only a situation like this brought up poor Dmitri as a subject. He relived his war memories, simultaneously checking the other man’s reaction, which is mainly understanding nods. 

David never asked anything strange or suspicious, and thus their meeting ended the same way it had started; mundane and overall pleasant. And it wasn’t the only encounter that went like this. A new lifestyle began for Yuri, in this base located somewhere in America. He chatted with the director once a day; for the rest, they gave him food, clothes and new paper. He started writing too at some point, besides drawing. He could finally count days, so now he knew he’d been there for a week.

One night, Yuri started having dreams. In the first one he was a patient in a mental ward. They kept him tied up and he yelled at the nurses to let him go, but he found that he’d forgotten his entire English vocabulary. He remembered weeping silently as they locked him up in a white, sterile room alone and left him there for some odd reason. Then the doctor entered, and it was David, in a lab coat and a set of aquamarine gloves. Yuri’s tears, which were previously abundantly cascading down his cheeks, now stopped. The American shushed him and placed a slight kiss on his forehead, as if he were a child. His skin tingled afterwards. He didn’t remember a lot more, because the terror of the syringe which followed shortly after woke him up in cold sweat. 

He meditated on whether he should tell David about this; after all, he was interested in every little detail of his personal life, so maybe he would’ve wanted to know; especially since the dream involved him. In the end, he decided to keep quiet. 

Little did he know that the oniric episode was just the first in a series of them. They went to India and David shot the tiger which was about to eat him. They drank and David carried him home. He fell into the sea from a ship and David threw him a lifebelt. He was always there, helping him selflessly, to the point where Yuri was inclined to ask him why he was really doing it. One day - a little dizzy from having woken up in the middle of the night - he realized that the question didn’t only apply to his dreams. 

He needed to know why the cheerful, kind and loving director was - just that: cheerful, kind and loving. Yuri’s idyllic life was stained by the suspicion, or rather, the realization that he was still captive and being interrogated. The problem was, if David was the one posing the questions and closely observing him, could he even ask anyone about what was behind all this? He had to have a purpose if the Americans put their efforts into making him comfortable and live his life with them. Were they going to question him about intel later on? 

No, of course not, another part of Yuri’s brain said, in an act of metaphorically injecting his mind with tranquilizer. He needn’t think. He was alive and David Mabury had been nothing but kind to him. It would be ungrateful to assume ulterior motives.

It was perhaps his eleventh meeting with the man, and Yuri kept absentmindedly giving monosyllabic answers, focusing on that never-fading smile he had failed to reproduce. 

“Are you in thought?” David asked after a short pause following the last answer. 

“You never talk about yourself” Yuri replied “It’s always me.”

“Well, I’m not supposed to be the subject of these conversations, Yuri.” The older man got up and started pacing up and down in the room casually.

“But I want to listen.”

“Alright then, since you insist…” David cleared his throat. “I’m not interesting. I normally live in Wisconsin, I have a house in the countryside. Unless, of course, I’m on duty.”

“Do you have animals?”

“Oh no” he chuckled “I wouldn’t be able to look after them consistently. I used to have a dog, but a car ran him over.”

Yuri alternated between asking and listening in fascination. The trivial and mundane details gained a new significance for him. They were tidbits of information he could use to build up the other’s character. Each time David opened his mouth, he got a little shaken up by the fear of him saying something that would make his idolized saviour-figure collapse, but it never happened. Mabury was an ordinary, respectable, dutiful and kind American military officer, and that, for Yuri, was perfection. He trusted the law’s decency, maybe naively so. Being handled by someone who knew the rules was all he needed, because the rules had to be in favor of him, after all.

The dreams didn’t stop; rather, they took on a new form. Now they became outright nightmares, sometimes about the confinement room, sometimes featuring David sitting on a podium in a white wig and with attorneys around, declaring him guilty. For two nights in a row, Yuri spent the time in his bed waking up from one horrific vision and entering another as soon as he fell into slumber. Naturally, this was enough to disrupt his sleeping pattern, the reason why he showed up at the next meeting with dark circles under his eyes and shaking hands, and David asked him if everything was fine.

Yuri mumbled something about the things he saw in his dreams but it came out as incoherent. He was dead tired and started to lose his grasp of reality. He found himself tearing up, from both being awake for too long and descending into insanity. Thinking of the first time he got here after he’d been captured and how he’d lost control over his brain resulted in a self-feeding mechanism of the young Russian being too afraid of going crazy and actually going crazy as a result. 

His furious thought process was interrupted by David kneeling down before his armchair and pulling him in for a hug. It caught Yuri off guard so much that he let out a small, surprised shriek. Nevertheless, he wrapped his arms around the director’s neck, feeling like a hurt puppy and very relieved at the same time. They remained silent and frozen for a few seconds and Yuri became conscious of little things like the smell of the other’s cologne or David’s stubble brushing against his cheek. Warm exhalations on the back of his neck. A strange appreciation of the mere presence of another human being in his time of need.

He went to bed merrily that night. Under his closed eyelids, re-elaborations and copies of David Mabury embracing him appeared, all from a different angle and perspective. Then he saw his life, his country house where he lived alone and his dog’s grave, but there was a woman with him, and in the next moment they were already kissing and making love inside, on a bed with bright, white sheets. Yuri watched intently, only to find out that there was no difference, in fact, between him and the woman, and that he was the one lying between David’s arms, their brotherly hug now acquiring a heavy undertone of mischief and social taboo. 

Yuri felt dizzy all day and spent his time lying on the bed and staring at the ceiling, unable to bring himself to draw or write. The only time he needed that magical ability to remove every memory of a dream as fast as possible, it didn’t come to his aid. Oddly, the fact that the subject of his fantasies was theoretically a war enemy disturbed him more than how he was thinking of another man like a woman would. He’d heard about the whole man-on-man kind of thing and that some people in the army did it, but had never really been interested in it. This made him roll around on his bedsheets franctically with the thought that physical attraction had nothing to do with his attachment to David. Albeit he’d never had a lover or serious love interest, Yuri knew that emotional ties were harder to sever and he’d been constantly reminding himself for the past week that he’d eventually leave this place one day.

On the same day, he came to the realization that he was regressing back into a teenage girl-like state, unable to look the other man in the eye and feeling overwhelmed by shame. When Mabury asked about it, he would refuse to say anything and blamed everything on the weather, even though he didn’t really know anything about the outside temperature. The chats began to feel uncomfortable, especially since they were running out of topics. For Yuri, it had become nothing but one or two hours of being transfixed by the director’s gaze as he held onto his teacup a little too tightly. He knew that David knew that there was something wrong, but only in the last ten minutes did he give a voice to his concerns.

“My fellow, you look sick!” 

“I do?” Yuri said back instinctively, which almost sounded ironic, given his sleep-deprived looks.

David gestured him to stand up, which the Russian slowly did. 

“Let me see your pulse” and with that, he took his hand, slightly pressing the artery on his wrist. Yuri tried desperately not to focus on the warmth of that palm holding his as the disgusting and depraved visions flashed back into his mind. Then his ‘savior’ reached out to his neck, a gesture which could be easily mistaken as a stroke, and it got harder and harder to remain calm. Yuri started hating himself and his brain intensively for his unexplained and illogical little ‘crush’. He had failed as a soldier, and now as a man and perhaps a mentally sane person too. At the same time, the only thing he saw when he looked at David was the only one who was helping him, the only one who cared. He gave in and slowly closed his eyelids, caring very little about how strange it must’ve seemed to the other. When David palmed his shoulder, what Yuri heard behind the phrase ‘Your pulse is alright’ wasn’t the actual meaning, but rather a hint at the fact that he was well aware of his intentions and the reason of his awkwardness. He pulled away in horror and the day’s meeting was declared over. 

He exited the room with his body warm and sweaty. As soon as he got locked up in his room once again, he threw himself on the bed and cried, and cried, and cried. He truly was a weakling, wasn’t he? But at least he had David. He was an absolute certainty, a guiding light that wouldn’t leave him. It wasn’t his grandma who was here with him and listened to him; it wasn’t anyone from the army, it wasn’t his family or comrade Krustchev. None of them really cared, otherwise they wouldn’t continue their lives, apathetic towards the fact that he disappeared. Once someone became a soldier, it seemed, their absence was more easily justifiable. They could shrug his whole existence off, because being erased from the face of the planet, having your life taken away was normal in war; it could happen to anyone, after all. It was an easy rationalization for the lack of guilt. But David really did care, he even wanted to know if Yuri was sick, and that made him tear up even more.

Nevertheless, it took him more than a little determination to walk into the office the next day and approach David Mabury who was nonchalantly leaning against a wall at the time. He took his surprised face in a pale, bony hand and gave him a chaste kiss on the lips. The part he wasn’t expecting was the other man kissing him back, seizing his waist with one arm and trapping him against the cement surface. 

“I’m going crazy, David” he declared and it wasn’t exactly a lie.

The director embraced him, placing slow caresses on his disheveled blonde hair.

“Yuri” he said soothingly, and was held tighter in response. 

“Yuri, tell me, who were the ten agents?”

And the names came out in one go, in the exact order he had diligently memorized them. The director gave him another kiss. Then, with a loving smile, he pulled out a pistol and pointed it between Yuri’s widened eyes. His last thoughts were about the steppes and which of the few English phrases he knew would have been appropriate to say David goodbye.


End file.
